David R. Drews

Behavioral and self-concept differences in tattooed and nontattooed college students.

235 college students rated themselves on a series of bipolar adjectives and answered questions about their involvement in a variety of “risky” behaviors, including tattooing and body piercing. 29 tattooed students rated themselves as more adventurous, creative, artistic, individualistic, and risky than those without tattoos. The 98 tattooed males considered themselves more attractive. Behaviorally, those with tattoos reported smoking more cigarettes. Tattooed men also reported more sexual partners, were more likely to report they had been arrested, and were more likely to have body piercings. The 21 tattooed women were more likely to report use of drugs other than alcohol, shoplifting, and body piercings in places other than their ears.

Observational and Competitive Measures of Dominance in Rats

Observations of social behaviors in a colony of nine male albino rats were subjected to a factor analysis which yielded evidence for a cluster of interrelated behaviors that included fighting wins, boxing, pinning losses, being groomed, not being mounted and a measure of total interactions. These observations were followed by individual pretraining for water and food competitions and paired competition tests. Factor analyses of these data indicate that pretraining measures of time spent consuming water or food and amount consumed are predictive of success in competition. Further, these analyses indicate that food and water competition are independent of one another and that water competition performance is related to a number of observational measures of social behavior, while food competition performance is not.

Measuring Dominance in Rats

The social behavior of a colony of 9 male albino rats was recorded over a 5-week period. These observations were followed by a series of paired food competitions which yielded a standard laboratory measure of dominance. Each of these measures was correlated with every other measure. Factor analysis of the resulting correlation matrix revealed a cluster of closely related behaviors, including fighting, boxing, grooming, mounting, and total interactions. Food competition was not significantly related to any of the behavioral indices. These findings do provide a basis for a unidimensional dominance concept of some descriptive breadth and also raise questions concerning the relation between measures obtained via seminaturalistic observation vs those typically used in laboratory studies of dominance.

Teacher Self-Ratings as a Validity Criterion for Student Evaluations

Student ratings were validated against instructor self-ratings by assessing student—faculty agreement concerning day-to-day variability within courses. For 15 days, students and instructors in each of four courses made daily evaluations. Analysis showed that student ratings and instructor self-ratings were significantly correlated in three areas: material covered, instructor performance, and overall impressions of the success of the class. These results are consistent with those of other studies that have argued for the ability of students to provide valid course evaluations. In addition, they avoid some of the interpretive problems of other criterion measures that have been used to validate student evaluations.

Positive Side Effects of Online Information Retrieval.

McGown and Spencer (1980) suggested that constructlon of tests for introductory statistics is facilitated if data sets have means and standard deviations that are integers They presented several sets for samples of n = 5, 6. and 7. It is fairly easy to devise data sets with integer means and standard deviations for larger samples One advantage of data sets wlth larger ns 1s that they look realistic when plotted as histograms or frequency polygons Such frequency distributions are also typical of tabulations where data have been grouped into class intervals for computational purposes. The procedure is to devise several sets with unit variance and zero mean. and then any combination of these also results in another set with unit variance and zero mean. A set with any desired mean (MT) and standard dev~ation(s) can be achieved by employing the transformation T = s(x) + MT; where T represents the reported measures or scores. Table 1

A descriptive study of social development in family groups of rats (Rattus norvegicus)

The social interactions of three family groups of rats (Rattus norvegicus) were observed daily when the litters were 25–32, 60–67, and 79–86 days old. In contrast to similar recent studies, fathers were present in these families. The data were analyzed to isolate the development of patterns of behavior specific to different age-sex classes. These data indicate frequent interactions between adult males and their young and suggest that the role of adult males in socialization of young deserves further attention.

Sampling Techniques and Sampling Error in Naturalistic Observation: An Empirical Evaluation With Implications for Cross-Cultural Research:

Naturalistic observation plays an important role in cross-cultural research, and in virtually all cases observations are made of popu lation samples, not whole populations. A variety of sampling strat egies have been devised for naturalistic fieldwork, but deviations from actual target populations differ widely depending on the strategy used. This study uses two sets of continuous observations of child touching behavior to empirically evaluate these various sampling strategies. We find that random samples are the only ones that reliably represent the target populations. This finding has a number of implications for cross-cultural research, primarily that (a) data collected using differing sampling techniques are likely to vary in their representativeness, making samples gathered with different techniques difficult to compare; and (b) because the repre sentativeness of any sample is partly a function of the nature of the target population, careful attention should be paid to the definition of target populations.

Predicting Attitudes Toward Operation Iraqi Freedom.

98 male and female college students ranging in age from 17 to 22 years (M = 19.2, SD = 1.1) were administered a questionnaire that contained Altemeyers 20-item Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale (RWA), questions about the legitimacy of the 2000 presidential election, Maytons Physical Nonviolence Subscale, and a scale designed to measure attitudes toward Operation Iraqi Freedom. RWA scores, perceptions of the legitimacy of the 2000 presidential election, and scores on the Physical Nonviolence subscale were independent predictors of attitudes toward Operation Iraqi Freedom. In addition, those who had higher RWA scores were more likely to perceive the 2000 presidential election as legitimate. There was no significant correlation between RWA scores and attitudes toward physical nonviolence.

Personal information in searching for faces

Participants searched for a target on a television monitor either after they viewed pictures and received physical information about the target or received that information augmented by personal information. Based on a levels of processing perspective we predicted that the addition of personal information would stimulate deeper processing and result in better identification performance. Personal information did increase identification accuracy, as anticipated. Personal information also increased the duration of time spent on the search task relative to a distractor task, suggesting that personal information may have done more than deepen the processing at the time of encoding. In the current climate of terrorism, this increase in identification performance via a surveillance camera has clear applied significance.

Rule structure in the psychological representation of physical settings

Abstract Three experiments were performed to demonstrate how physical settings may be conceptualized in terms of the behavioral rules associated with them. Subjects participated in similarity rating, recognition memory, and likelihood estimation tasks. In the similarity rating task, overlap in the rules listed in free response protocols for 10 different settings predicted global similarity ratings between pairs of settings. In the recognition memory task, after subjects read a description of a stimulus person behaving in ways prescribed by a setting, distractor behaviors highly typical of a given setting were more effective in eliciting false positive recognitions than were distractors less typical of the setting in question. Finally, subjects were asked to predict the future behavior of a stimulus person on the basis of a behavioral description of past behavior characteristic of a particular setting. Subsequently, these subjects rated future behaviors highly typical of that setting as more probable than behaviors less typical of that setting. Taken together, these data argue that behavioral rules should be viewed as a part of the cognitive representation of physical settings.